 | | Bringing up prototype circuit boards is a tipping point in the product development cycle. Unfortunately, it too often becomes a tripping point. Boards that won’t come up derail the project, delaying launch and generating staggering opportunity costs. The legacy technologies that have been employed for board bring-up have their limitations. They rely on physically probing the board while probe access is disappearing or expensive fixtures. Now many engineers are turning to software-based non-intrusive embedded instruments to perform tests, to gather validation data and to diagnose any hardware faults that may be present on a circuit board. And these tools can be employed before operating firmware or software have been loaded onto the board. |
| The new Remote Instrumentation Controller 4000 (RIC-4000) for ASSETâÄôs ScanWorks® platform for embedded instruments can connect over an Ethernet network and apply boundary scan (JTAG) tests on as many as four circuit boards at once. The units under test (UUT) and ScanWorks could be in the same room on the same local network or they might be across the globe, connected over the Internet. ASSET® InterTech (www.asset-intertech.com) is the leading supplier of tools for embedded instrumentation. |
| The role that FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) have played in computer and communications systems has grown in parallel with the number of gates and the capabilities of these devices. Now FPGAs are emerging as a likely platform for next-generation embedded board test and measurement capabilities which can be employed during design, development, manufacturing, and in the field following product launch. Without requiring a dedicated FPGA, a board-tester-in-a-chip can be easily inserted and removed as it is needed or it can remain in-system. This trend toward FPGA-controlled test (FCT) is a part of the larger shift toward embedded instrumentation as a more effective methodology for validating, testing and debugging circuit boards. |
| With new tools for the ASSET® ScanWorks® platform for embedded instruments engineers can simply select instruments they need, set their parameters and insert them into a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to function as a circuit board tester. Once inserted, ScanWorks FCT operates the board-tester-in-a-chip from a drag-and-drop user interface to perform validation, test and debug. |
| ASSET®âÄôs ScanWorks® is the only tool able to access IntelâÄôs embedded instruments and perform advanced validation on all of the high-speed buses on a board based on the microarchitecture codenamed Haswell Core Processor family |
| A new model-based test methodology for ASSET® InterTechâÄôs ScanWorks® platform for embedded instruments extends non-intrusive boundary-scan (JTAG) test coverage to devices that previously could not be tested or programmed with boundary scan. |
| A new toolkit for ASSET's ScanWorks platform for embedded instruments allows memory suppliers to validate the connectivity of their DDR3 memory chips with Intel processors |
| In a new whitepaper from ASSET InterTech, Al Couch, ASSET’s chief technologist for core instrumentation and co-chairman of the IEEE P1687 IJTAG working group, explains how the standard will enable instruments that were originally embedded into chips for chip characterization and test can be re-used later in circuit board design validation, volume manufacturing test and field service troubleshooting. |
| A new embedded debugger for Intel x86 platforms for remote diagnostics anywhere, anytime |
| Referred to as the ScanWorks embedded diagnostics solution, the debugger firmware operates out of an x86-based circuit board’s service processor, which is sometimes called the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) and may be implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) on the board |
| The ScanWorks is the first with validation and test tools for the newly announced families of server processors, the Intel Xeon 5600 and 7500 series, and the Itanium 9300 series |
| The ScanWorks platform for embedded instruments is the first test platform to support Intel new second generation Core processors (formerly codenamed Sandy Bridge) |
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